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The 36th annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival has announced the musical line-up for the April 22 – May 1 cultural extravaganza.

Billed as “the ultimate celebration of Louisiana culture and heritage,” this year’s Jazz Fest will offer an eclectic variety of bands and artists including Dave Matthews Band, James Taylor, Nelly, B.B. King, Juanes, Trey Anastasio, Elvis Costello, The Roots, Randy Newman, Ozomatli, Los Lonely Boys, and dozens more.

“Think of New Orleans as the center of the music universe,” Quit Davis, Jazz Fest producer/director, said in a statement. “Gospel, jazz, blues, funk, rock, Cajun, zydeco, Latin, R&B, jam, Mardi Gras, hip-hop, African, and a whole lotta music you can’t put into any category will be presented in the powerful way that only Jazz Fest can serve up.”

Jazz Fest will be held at the New Orleans Fair Grounds Race Course, and will feature 12 performance stages all going simultaneously, along with more than 100 varieties of Louisiana and international foods. The event will also feature several crafts fairs.

This year’s Jazz Fest will also present El Dia Latino (Latin Day), April 24, featureing a stage with non-stop all-Latin entertainment.

In addition, a new festival stage will be devoted to bastions of traditional and contemporary New Orleans culture: brass band music, second line dance clubs, Mardi Gras Indians, and other indelible features of the coty

This year, however, Jazz Fest has scrapped its evening concert series, according to the city’s Times-Picayune.

Tickets for the seven-day festival went on sale January 31. Daily tickets for the Heritage Fair are $20 through February 22. On February 23, advance daily tickets will be $25. Tickets at the gate will cost $35, while daily ducats for children under 12 are $5 in advance and at the gate.

Source pollstar.com.

Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry will release his self-titled solo album on May 3rd. The thirteen-track blues-rock effort is Perry’s first under his own name since 1984’s Once a Rocker, Always a Rocker, the third and final release under the Joe Perry Project moniker.

Perry admits that his own mortality was an impetus for finishing the new record. “I had this pile of riffs, but a song really isn’t a song until you get lyrics and a melody on it,” he says. “I thought, ‘If my motorcycle hits a tree, my wife’s gonna have nothing to put out.'”

After using three different lead vocalists for the Joe Perry Project albums, the guitarist took on the challenge of singing many of the Joe Perry songs himself. By writing in a lower register, he came up with songs that fit his deep voice, but he doesn’t think Steven Tyler’s job as Aerosmith singer is in jeopardy. “A lot of my riffs were originally written with Steven in mind,” he says. “I work with one of the best rock & roll voices in the world, and my voice isn’t anywhere near that.

The album — which includes eleven Perry originals, including the uptempo single “Shakin’ My Cage,” plus covers of the Doors’ “The Crystal Ship” and Woody Guthrie’s “Vigilante Man” — was recorded in the guitarist’s home studio in Boston, a.k.a. “the Boneyard.” Engineer Paul Caruso, who has worked on recent Aerosmith records, also served as drummer and co-producer.

Perry does not have plans for a tour to support the album, but that might be good news for Aerosmith fans. “I may end up not having the time,” he says. “We’re talking about going on the road with Aerosmith in September.”

Source rollingstone.com.

The reunited Black Crowes have been added to the bill for the Bonnaroo festival (June 11 in Manchester, Tenn.) and New Orleans’ annual Jazz and Heritage festival (April 22). In addition, the group has added two additional shows, March 29-30, to its previously announced five-night run at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom.

Those gigs sold out within minutes of going on sale to the general public over the weekend. Tickets for the newly added dates, which will feature support by North Mississippi Allstars, will be available via an Internet pre-sale starting Thursday (Feb. 10) and to the general public on Saturday.

According to the band’s official Web site, the majority of the tickets for the March 29-30 shows will be up for grabs during the Internet presale.

It is still unknown which musicians will be joining principal Crowes members Chris and Rich Robinson at the shows, which will be the band’s first since later October 2001.

Source billboard.com.

Ween remains on hiatus after canceling a U.S. tour last fall due to an undisclosed health issue afflicting one of its members. But with any luck, the rock duo will return “browner than ever,” group member Mickey “Dean Ween” Melchiondo wrote on Ween’s official Web site.

He added that there’s no timetable for Ween’s next studio album, but that another CD, expected to be a live album, will appear beforehand on the band’s own Chocodog imprint. “I don’t want to reveal what will be on it just yet but I think many people are gonna freak out,” he said. It has been a long time in coming.”

“I imagine that we’ll be back in the studio and on tour sometime later this year so please just bear with us,” he reported. “I’m amazed at the amount of people e-mailing us, begging us to save another Bonnaroo festival this year with our presence. We are not relief workers.”

In the meantime, Melchiondo says he is “pretty far along” on the fourth album from his Moistboyz project, while drummer Claude Coleman has recorded an album with the band Amandla.

However, one piece of Melchiondo-related music that may not see the light of day for awhile is his contribution to the Queens Of The Stone Age track “The Fun Machine Took a Sh*t and Died,” which didn’t make the cut for the band’s upcoming Interscope album, “Lullabies To Paralyze.”

“It’s a monster, but we didn’t finish it in time,” QOTSA leader Josh Homme tells Billboard.com, adding that “Mickey is such a straight shooter. You’ll play him something and be like, ‘How about this?’ And he’s not afraid to say, ‘Actually, that’s pretty lame.’ To me, that’s such a relief!”

Source billboard.com.

Now that frontman Rivers Cuomo has completed a semester of school at Harvard University, the track list for Weezer’s new album is “97% settled,” according to the band’s official Web site. The as-yet-untitled set is due in May via Geffen; first single “Beverly Hills” will hit U.S. radio outlets in late March.

The selection process is nearing completion thanks to “some heavy listening sessions between the band and producer/mentor Rick Rubin,” the site reports. “A few songs got swapped out and switched around, and there is high confidence in the final selection, which now includes a few songs from the late ’03 recording sessions that were originally left behind in favor of the new sessions in July-October ’04.”

Cuomo still has to complete his vocals for three songs, at which point the album will be ready for mixing.

As previously reported, Weezer earlier this week announced its first show since late 2002, which will come on the first day of the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in Indio, Calif., on April 30. A full North American and European tour is expected to follow.

Source billboard.com.

The Slip have announced that they will be playing three shows in Japan in February. This is their fifth trip to Japan.

Japan Tour

-Feb 18th at Shibuya O’east in Shibuya Tokyo.
-Feb 19th – catching the break at the Greenroom Festival
(“surf rock event”)in Yokohama Osanbashi Hall
-Feb. 20th the first show in the ancient Japanese capital of Kyoto at MOJO WEST

Timo Shanko will be joining the band on saxaphones.

Is music something you own or something you rent?

How music fans answer that question in coming months will help determine the viability of a new slate of online music services that offer to fill portable music players with an unlimited number of songs for a monthly fee.

While the music subscription approach has grown in recent years, far more music fans have opted to buy songs by the track, a business model popularized by Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes Music Store and its hugely successful iPod portable player.

But the release late last year of new copy-protection software from Microsoft Corp. may begin to change that. The software frees subscribers to move their rented tracks from their computers to certain portable music players.

The system works by essentially putting a timer on the tracks loaded on the player. Every time the user connects the player to the PC and the music service, the player automatically checks whether the user’s subscription is still in effect. Songs stop playing if the subscription has lapsed. If the user doesn’t regularly synch up the player with the service, the songs go dead as well.

“This is potentially the first serious challenge that the iPod is going to face,” said Phil Leigh, president of Tampa, Fla.-based Inside Digital Media. “What these devices are going to be able to do is attack iPod where it’s weak.”

Several online music purveyors see portability as selling point that can lure consumers to their subscription services. Forrester Research projects music subscription revenues will more than double this year to $240 million, largely because of portability.

RealNetworks, MusicNow and MusicNet, which distributes its service through brands like America Online and Cdigix, all have plans to launch portable subscription services this year or early 2006 at the latest.

Napster LLC and F.Y.E., another MusicNet distributor, began offering portable subscriptions late last year through the Windows Media Player software, code named Janus.

Napster plans to turn up the heat on Apple with a $30 million advertising campaign debuting during Sunday’s Super Bowl to promote a relaunch of its portable subscription service, dubbed Napster To Go.

“This is really the first subscription service supporting Janus that’s going out in a big way,” said Josh Bernoff, an analyst with Forrester Research. “Napster is charging a lot harder than the rest of them.”

Napster’s service is $14.95 a month

Galactic has announced dates for their 2005 Midwest Tour which will span the Southeast and Midwest beginning at the end of March. Some very special supporting acts are scheduled to join the band throughout. For the opening dates, Galactic will be joined by New Orleans underground hip hop collective, the Media Darling showcase. On April 8 and 9th the band will return for their now customary two-night stand at Denver, Colorado’s Fillmore theatre. As in the past, these shows will feature incredible supporting acts as Galactic will welcome Toots and the Maytals for the first night and then Maceo Parker on the second. Please stay tuned to the Galactic web site for additional tour support announcements.

Galactic Spring 2005 Tour:
3.29.05 | Headliner’s | Louisville, KY
3.30.05 | Blue Cat’s | Knoxville, TN
3.31.05 | The Orange Peel | Asheville, NC
4.01.05 | The Odeon | Cleveland, OH
4.02.05 | Vic Theatre | Chicago, IL
4.03.05 | The Vogue Theatre | Indianapolis, IN
4.05.05 | Barrymore Theatre | Madison, WI
4.06.05 | Cabooze | Minneapolis, MN
4.07.05 | Rococo Theatre | Lincoln, NE
4.08.05 | The Fillmore | Denver, CO
4.09.05 | The Fillmore | Denver, CO
4.10.05 | Granada Theater | Lawrence, KS
4.12.05 | Mississippi Nights | St. Louis, MO
4.13.05 | Cain’s Ballroom | Tulsa, OK
4.14.05 | Juanita’s | Little Rock, AK
4.15.05 | Workplay Theatre | Birmingham, AL

In the wake of an unfinished copy of his new album leaking onto the Internet last month, Beck will offer fans a bounty of reasons to purchase the real deal. Due March 29 via Interscope, “Guero” will be released as a standard CD, a double-disc package with two videos and a 5.1 audio mix and a third edition featuring four remixes.

Videos for “E-Pro” and “Black Tambourine” will be included on the double-disc set, while Boards Of Canada, Octet, Dizzee Rascal and, as first reported here, Royksopp, contribute the remixes on the third package.

On Tuesday (Feb. 1), Beck quietly unveiled the “Hell Yes” EP on Apple’s iTunes Music Store, featuring remixes of the title track and “Que Onda Guero” by 8-bit and remixes of “E-Pro” and “Girl” by Paza. A video for “Hell Yes” directed by Mumbleboy is also available on iTunes.

Beck has yet to confirm tour dates in support of “Guero,” but he played his second surprise show in recent weeks last Friday at Echo in Los Angeles, which featured a number of tracks from the new album.

Source billboard.com.

Three-time Grammy winner Lucinda Williams will release Live at the Fillmore, her first-ever live album, on May 10th.

The two-disc set, recorded at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore Auditorium last year during her World Without Tears tour, features twenty-two tracks from Williams’ twenty-five-plus-year career. Included in the set list are “Change the Locks,” from 1988’s Lucinda Williams and later recorded by Tom Petty; “Pineola,” a poignant song about a family friend’s suicide from 1992’s Sweet Old World; and “Those Three Days,” from Williams’ most recent studio album World Without Tears.

The Live at the Fillmore track listing:

Disc One:

Ventura
Reason to Cry
Fruits of My Labor
Out of Touch
Sweet Side
Lonely Girls
Overtime
Blue
Change the Locks
Atonement

Disc Two:

I Lost It
Pineola
Righteously
Joy
Essence
Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings
Are You Down
Those Three Days
American Dream
World Without Tears
Bus to Baton Rouge
Words Fell

Source rollingstone.com.